Cloud Hosting

Cloud Hosting. What is Cloud
Hosting? How does Cloud Hosting work? Who are the main Cloud Hosting Providers?
A listing of the main Cloud Hosting Providers. How does Cloud Hosting compare with other
hosting methods? What are the benefits of Cloud Hosting?

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud Hosting is based on
the principles of Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is the
delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, where shared
resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other
devices as a utility (such as the electricity supply to your home or to where
you work) over a network (typically the Internet).

Cloud Hosting focuses on
keeping your website up and running and handling the peaks in usage easily.
This is achieved by spreading the resources required for your website among
many physical servers thus reducing the reliance on any single piece of
computing hardware.

With Cloud Hosting you can say goodbye to
the old idea of renting a server or shared server space. Cloud Hosting provides
us with server clustering. Instead of using the power of one server, you have
access to the power of many; linked together through visualization.

We have all seen the situations where a website might be under stress because
it has had a sudden burst of popularity. With regular shared hosting once that
website reaches the limits of the single server, it is on, it chokes. With
Cloud Hosting the website would have access to multiple different servers and
so have access to as much bandwidth, RAM, CPU power or any other server side
resource that it needed.

Cloud Hosting provides computing power, on demand, when you need it. If you no
longer need so much power, you can easily release the resources back into the
“Cloud” so that they can be used by others.

How does Cloud Hosting work?

A significant number of individual servers
are teamed together to create a ‘Cloud’. This has many advantages – it balances
overall load between the servers, massively reduces the reliance on individual
physical servers for service provision and provides flexibility to deploy
resources as required.

Individual virtual machines are then deployed
into the cloud, each with their own resource allocations such as processor,
memory and disk storage. Disk storage in enterprise clouds is provisioned on single
highly available SANs (Storage Area Networks).

Software is installed on each physical
server called a ‘hypervisor’. This is usually a small piece of code that
controls the virtual machines that will run on the physical hardware. The most
common hypervisors used are VMware, Xen and Hyper-v.

The traditional way of hosting your website
is either with Shared Web Hosting or using a Dedicated Server to host your
site. These have their own merits, but compared to Cloud Hosting they’re
looking a bit dated.

Shared Web Hosting: is sharing resources with many other websites on
the assumption that not all sites will be resource hungry all of the time. If
another site on your server is a hog, your site will suffer – you have no
guarantee of the resources when you need them.

Dedicated Server Hosting: you pay for the storage capacity and power of a whole server even if you don’t use it. Some
days you may get a spike in traffic, but no matter how much you use, you always
pay the full price. If you exceed the resources of this physical server,
you have to buy another server
to share the load. More cost.

With Cloud Hosting you benefit from the
principles of cloud computing in the following way:

Dedicated Resources: All resources allocated to you are yours and
yours alone – you don’t share it. If you are allocated xMB of RAM, you
will always have xMB.

Scalable Resources: When you suddenly need more resources, you
don’t need to install new hardware, or add another server, or steal them
from someone else sharing your server. Instead you simply allocate more to
your website from the cloud. Since there are many servers
interconnected in your cloud, you can provision whatever you need,
whenever you need (and of course, whatever you provision is yours and
yours alone).

Resilient Resources: Imagine if a whole server in the cloud crashes
and burns? Your site will still be running because redundancy is built
into the cloud computing model – if one “node” on the network of machines
fails, the rest will pick up the slack (compare this with either shared or
dedicated server hosting above = disaster)

What are the benefits of Cloud Hosting?

Cloud Hosting provides significant
advantages to its users. Cloud Hosting scalability and cost efficiency are its
main benefits.

As the technology is highly scalable (load
balancing, hardware upgrades, etc), website expansion can be done with the
minimum of fuss. Think about the hassle of transferring your website from a
shared server to a dedicated server; think about server crash when your website
experiences a sudden surge – all these problems can be avoided easily by
switching to Cloud Hosting.

Cost is another huge benefit when you need a
lot of processing power. Cloud Hosting companies charge their users based on
the quantity of computing power consumed. It is similar to your electricity and
water supply bills – you pay only for what you use. Therefore gone are the days
when you need to reserve massive server resources to avoid website crash due to
sudden traffic surges.